The Dark Side of the Moon BBS in San Jose, CA, originally
ran as an AE (Ascii Express) line in the mid 1980's. Because
Ascii Express was already demonstrating bugs and issues at that
time, the maintainers rewrote the AE interface from scratch on
a new program. After a while, they were constricted by the pure
file transfer aspects of the AE Line, and announced they were
going to become a BBS. This new software, called Waffle, took
the line by storm and turned out to be a flexible, fun,
well-coded piece of work. After a period of time, the creator
(Tom Dell, Sysop of The Dark Side) chose to port his program
over to the PC as well as UNIX and Xenix, and the program gained
new life on the PC Platform as it was distributed as both a
free and for-pay program.

What won many folks over to Waffle, however, was its ease of
interface to the UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy) networks and protocol.
With extreme ease, you could integrate newsgroups and e-mail
directly into your BBS. In the late 1980's. Waffle could even
be run as a pure mail tosser, rejecting the BBS aspect entirely.
This caused a specific and large burst of interest.

Waffle formed the basis for the famous MINDVOX BBS service
in New York City, and while Dell had little direct involvement,
his code was used extensively to hook in many disparate elements
under a single interface.

Ultimately, Waffle's distribution ended at 1.65, although a
version 1.66 was in beta at the main website. There was work
being done on CHROME, a graphical interface to Waffle, and
so on. However, the encroaching of the Internet led the
author to aim his skills in other directions, dooming Waffle
as an ongoing project.